Hope you're all fine? It surely has gotten cold recently - even here in Kansai.

I'm sorry that I haven't been around much, but as I told you in one of my previous entries it's the busiest time for me right now - until the middle of January. It's mainly all good things, but I'm still insanely busy because of them!

My family came to Japan for (only) one week. It was the second time for my brother (as some of you might remember).I was busy creating a good travel plan for them. My brother mainly wanted to see Kyoto and Osaka as he didn't see anything of Kansai last time he came.

I could only spend 4 full days with them because of work. I even took one day off to have 4 consecutive days, but I also did day trips on my working days where I had to leave them in the early afternoon. Extremely busy and exhausting I tell you! I was the first one to get up in the morning to make them breakfast, then guided them around, then had lunch with them, then rushed to work, worked for 8h, came back home to make sure they had everything they needed, made a list with train and bus times for the next day for the time I wouldn't be around so that they knew how they could come back to my apartment .... and was thus the last to go to bed. PHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My printer stopped working and I was about to buy a new one, but my brother managed to fix it.I miss having people around me who can do things I can't and can help me out when needed! ;____; .....

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There's still some cleaning up, laundry and stuff to do now that they're gone, but I decided to take a break this weekend!Before they came I was in a rush to finish booking all the flights for Okinawa ... and the hotels .... and I barely finished. It was 2am by that time and I had to get up at 4:30am to catch an early train to Kyoto and meet my family.

In 3 weeks I'm already off to Okinawa and right after that is a wedding of a former co-worker.

On top of that I also need to renew my ARC (alien registration card) - or rather get the new residence card ... and renew my visa ASAP!!!!!!!

I really hope I can relax in February for a bit. This year has been crazy!!!!

Another of chochajin´s Japan picspams lies ahead of you XDDDDThis time I decided to post photos of Fushimi Inari (if you´ve watched "Memoirs of a Geisha" .. or whatever it´s called in America XD), you prolly already know it ^-^, Besides Fushimi Inari there will be photos of Himeji, almost only of Himeji Castle. You´ll see that for example "Last Samurai" was shot there ^^; (although Shogun and one James Bond movie ... have forgotten the name though XD;; .... *coughs*)